Modernization

Most organizations are concerned about the state of their legacy applications. Many were built years ago using expensive technologies, inflexible architectures and have been heavily modified creating a potentially dangerous situation just waiting to happen. In several high-profile instances it already has – massive security breaches and other system failures are becoming all too common.

More common is simply frustration with the glacial pace of responding to change. New business initiatives, often critical for growth, are frequently delayed due to difficulties aligning or creating software capabilities to support them. The reality is that very few legacy applications, much less portfolios, are constructed or supported in a manner that enables faster cycle times.   Monoliths are not flexible, are not sufficiently modularized and have too many hard-coded dependencies to be responsive to the business.

We advocate a capability-driven, service-based approach that delivers the 4 core tenants of real modernization:

1. Business Rule Separation: Business Rule logic no longer belongs locked in code. Rules or Decisions must be harvested, rationalized and architected into a business-accessible platform where they can be shared across the portfolio and managed by their business owners without full development cycles.
2. Independent Resources: These are independently deployable, scalable Microservices that deliver open interfaces to all lifecycle state activity of a data resource providing security, performance and consistency.
3. Processes and Events: Long-running business processes can be delivered with flexible Business Process Management tools accessing underlying microservices to perform work and the rules platform to make decisions. Event architectures are useful for decoupling integration dependencies and for achieving portfolio-wide flexibility coordinating and responding to state changes.
4. DevOps: Have all of your software components plugged into a continuous Integration/continuous deployment pipeline with comprehensive automated testing.

This modernization approach is executed incrementally, establishing base capabilities and enriching as more and more of the scoped portfolio is transitioned. In the end, rather than a plethora of silo applications connected with hundreds of point-to-point integrations; you have a concise, easier to manage, responsive software portfolio that has a much smaller footprint.

The most significant advantage, however, is that the architectural characteristics of the modernized portfolio enable nearly continuous modernization going forward. Imagine, no more risky and expensive “big-bang” projects, and a lot more confidence about what condition your software is really in.

That’s real modernization!